Russian computer program fakes chatroom flirting

CAN FOOL USERS

A spokesman for PC Tools said the program had a "terrifyingly well-organized" interaction that could fool users into giving up personal details and could easily be converted to work in other languages.

"As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering," Sergei Shevchenko, Senior Malware Analyst at PC Tools, said in a statement.

"It employs highly intelligent and customized dialogue to target users of social networking systems."

He said the program "can monitor Internet browser activity, automatically recognize and fill in the fields in the web pages, generate keystrokes and mouse clicks, and post messages, URLs, files and photos."

"It can do exactly what users normally do when they are online, only in an automated pre-programmed way."

The CyberLover.ru site denied the program did anything wrong, saying it only gathered information that chatroom users themselves were volunteering.

"The program can find no more information than the user is prepared to provide," one of the site's employees, who gave his name only as Alexander, said in an emailed reply to Reuters questions.

"It maintains a dialogue with a person, but is not engaged in hacking or any other such schemes, I think this should be obvious," he said.